


There Must Be

by leiascully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-11-18
Updated: 2005-11-18
Packaged: 2017-10-03 07:20:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wasn't sure if this was love or gravity, but it was inexorable</p>
            </blockquote>





	There Must Be

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: post-"This Is Not Happening"  
> A/N: Written for [50 Ways To Leave Your Lover](http://frowl.org/50ways). This is so old and not at all my favorite, but it shows progress. Right?  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this and no infringement is intended.

Scully had thought about it so many times. There had to be fifty ways, a hundred ways to leave him. She composed monolithic explanations of the reasons for her departure, novellas of resignation letters, a thousand brief notes that started Dear Mulder and never got further than her striking out the dear.

Mulder, they all began. Mulder, I can't. Sometimes Mulder, I won't. And that was as far as she ever got. Her wastepaper basket was a morgue of cadaverous cryptic notes, all From the Desk of: although she didn't have a desk. Scully spent the long hours alone in the office steeling herself against his hazel eyes and his beautiful mind, calculating probabilities and calmly dissecting her emotions, but he always got to her. He called or walked through the door and she rolled her eyes but went along. There were some forces a physicist couldn't ignore; she wasn't sure if this was love or gravity, but it was inexorable. One way or another, she couldn't escape his orbit.

When she thought about it, in the night when she couldn't sleep, restless against her pillows, she knew it was love. At least it had once been something she could call love. She remembered the vibrating puppy-like eagerness she had had to go into the office the first couple of years they were together, the shivers of excitement his proximity had caused. When he had touched her, casually, non-sexually, she had thought she might die. She had fidgeted listening to his long lectures, intent on his voice while her eyes focused on his lean fingers. It was like having a crush on a hot professor or a camp counselor. Some nights she fell asleep in his hotel room and woke to see him curled up on a chair, his long body relaxed as an infant's.

Back then, it was more worship than love. Back then, there were thousands of ways she could have left him. Promotion. Relocation. A reassessment of priority. Any whim would have done. Just simply walking out the door, a little wave for him, or a few words on a Post-it left on his desk. Now, of course, that was impossible. Love had made her verbose without giving her his eloquence; she felt pregnant with words, unable to give birth to a useful text that could explain to him why she had to leave, and to leave without explanation was unthinkable.

The time after that, after her abduction, had been all unyielding passion. They had gone everywhere, done everything, as a unit. Not even a team, just one mind between them. The intensity of it nearly killed her. He touched her hand and she turned inside out. She had been less intimate with her lovers. Scully had seen Mulder naked. She had stripped him down with deft fingers to dress his wounds. She knew he had seen her naked, and knew enough of him to believe that despite the desperate circumstances that had brought him to the point of lugging her naked body around an iceberg, his photographic memory would have made a map of her body. By now she was beyond feeling vulnerable about it. Their intimacy was not something she could explain. It was beyond either of them, she thought.

After the death of her daughter, things had changed. She had drawn away from him and he had followed her. Cut and run. She wasn't sure if she was trying to leave him, or just trying to leave. He had followed her to the unexplored territories of her illness and her faith and her wants, and to Antarctica, and together they had played cartographer, ignoring the way the topographies of their minds fitted together. Their partnership got casual, the aching precision of their focus dissipating into flirtation. Scully couldn't say if it was better. She didn't know what Mulder wanted. She didn't know what she wanted. Without words it would never be resolved. Her fetters were invisible and generally intangible; her independence was real, but still she was tied to him.

Sometimes her life felt like a long game of hide and seek.

He was a broken man and she had played all the king's men and put him back together more times than she could count. She could see the seams as if she had x-ray vision. It amused her to think that way, the doctor with the x-ray vision. It kept her from despair. She could see the cracks in her own beliefs, in her body and heart, but Mulder's long arms had kept her from shattering. Somehow.

When they had kissed, when they had slept together, it had been anticlimatic. It was good, and she had been parched with a lack of sex, but it didn't feel like a first time. The thrill of a brand new body was missing; she felt comfortable with him, and pleasantly surprised, but there were no revelations under his down comforter. When he fell asleep, she left.

It didn't feel like love any more, not what she had thought love was. When Scully allowed herself the leisure of considering Mulder, she was overwhelmed. What she thought of Mulder and what she knew of Mulder - it was deeper than love. She didn't have a word for it. She sifted through her vocabulary the way that she sifted through evidence, turned the words over and over in her mouth, let them slide down her throat.

There had been so many ways to leave him and now there were none.

In the end it was simple. He left her in the swiftest and most permanent way possible. Her hair had grown long by the time of the funeral; the wind blew snow into it, and over the dark sleeves of her coat. The tears she couldn't stop fell onto the coffin as a series of points. An ellipsis, fitting punctuation for so many lives unresolved.


End file.
